Back in the day, my very first Linux installation was Slackware. Yes that one, and yes I did it from floppy disks. Tens of them if I remember right. From there I bought (it was a thing) the boxed set of Redhat. If memory serves it was version 5 or 6. Linux moved from a wonder to something that I was starting to use at home to experiment with.

Working through the frustrations of Slackware, the now what of Redhat ("I have it installed, now what?"), a heard someone mention this thing called Debian and wonder of thousands of packages that could be installed. To be fair to both Slackware and Redhat, I was using those before I had a DSL or Cable Internet connection. Imagine the joys of 56K modem and downloading floppy images for my Slackware installation...

As we all were just starting on the journey of hosting web pages either from our home systems or on our ISP's web servers, I was intrigued by the thought of typing a command to simply install a web server. With this being something of revelation, I figured out how to install it and install everthing from web server software to browsers. It was fun. But in time, I was drawn back to things like Fedora Core, early Ubuntu releases, Arch, back to Fedora, back to Ubuntu, etc.

Fast forward to now, Debian just got a lot of press in the Fall of 2025 for its Debian 13 release. I watched a lot of reviews (an example one here), almost all of which talked about the benefits of Debian:

• An emphasis on security. Through patient and rigorous patching by dedicated volunteers, Debian is considered to be very security focussed.
• Stable, as they pick a version to maintain for the life of that release, there is little change in functionality of software between releases.
• A very large repository of packages available for installation.
• It's the parent of Ubuntu, Raspbian, Kali Linux, Tails so there is a significant amount contributions to the project from those outside of Debian as well.

I've recently installed it and can say that I'm impressed. Several things stand out right away:

• The installer is easy to use.
• The cadance of updates is quite slow due to not following the latest release and instead on patching for security or bugs only.
• Things just work.
• Flatpaks make up for having the latest and greatest of something if you really need it. For example, if you want the latest LibreOffice to have the most up to date code for compatibility with Word, install the Flatpak.

The only downsides that I have found are:

• You can suffer from update envy. When others are getting X in there latest release of Fedora or Ubuntu, and yes in Arch, you'll will either have to install the Flatpak or wait for the next release of Debian.
• You will have more free time as you won't have to download, install, and reboot your systems as often as updates are done for patching only rather than simple version bumps. The cadance is just slower, but is reported to be just as secure as the others, so you'll just have to get used to simply using the machine.

So, I'm only two weeks in but I'm enjoying it. I've mostly installed packages from the repos but there are a few flatpaks as well (Audacity, OBS, Keepassxc) as they have features that I want in their current versions.

Happy Linux'ing!